page_title: George Blagge
section_title: Poet
hierarchical_section_title: George Blagge / Poet
caption_attribution_description: English: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.
context_page_description: Sir George Blagge was an English courtier, politician, soldier and a minor poet. He was the Member of Parliament for Bedford from 1545 to 1547, and Westminster from 1547 to 1551, during the reign of Edward VI. His trial and condemnation for heresy in 1546 earned him a place in Protestant martyrology. His family surname was frequently rendered Blage by contemporaries, while another variant was Blake.
context_section_description: Blagge belonged to a circle of poets but his own poetry is considered poor. His output was probably considerable but only about six poems survive, mainly on political themes. They include verse on Catherine Parr and Jane Seymour, although the best known is a mordant epitaph for Wriothesley:
  Picture of pride; of papistry the plat:
  In whom Treason, as in a throne did sit;
  With ireful eye, aye glearing like a cat,
  Killing by spite whom he thought good to hit.
  This dog is dead ...
  Blagge's most important contribution to English poetry was his habit of collecting his friends' poems. The result was the famous Blage manuscript, now MS D.2.7 in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Rediscovered only in the 1960s, it widened the known oeuvre of Thomas Wyatt and his circle, although it overlaps considerably with another collection, the Devonshire manuscript.
caption: Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton, a portrait probably after Hans Holbein the Younger. Wriothesley trimmed to please the prevailing regime, whatever its religious complexion. He condemned Blagge to death for heresy and was the target of his most savage verse.
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